LITMIR.BIZ

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      I’m barely hanging on.

      “You weren’t driving the car. You always drive the fucking speed limit anyway. I wish you had been driving instead of Gabe. Maybe then... Maybe...” The giggles shift to a full-body sob, but I can’t stop the words spilling from my tear-damp lips. “I hear it all the time. The crash. Have I told you that, what it sounded like? Did you know metal screams when it’s being ripped apart? Like, it actually screams.” Anna stands quickly, grabbing her stuff and then my arm as I sob around my words.

      “Come on.” Anna ushers me through the now crowded tables. There are murmurs, chairs pulling in to accommodate our quick departure. She leads me outside, into the cold air. I concentrate on breathing. In and out. In and out.

      But I can’t catch my breath, my lungs rejecting the air. My vision narrows to a long, dark tunnel, and I drop to the sidewalk.

       6

      I wake up in the emergency room, a bright light piercing my vision.

      “Ms. Lawson? That’s it, Tegan, open your eyes,” an unfamiliar voice says.

      “Thank God.” Anna sounds like she has a terrible cold, her nose too stuffy to breathe through. Her face hovers over mine and I blink a few times. She’s quite blotchy, her eyes red and swollen from crying.

      “How are you feeling?” The voice belongs to a middle-aged man in muted green scrubs. He has on glasses that make him look quite Clark Kent–like. Cute and nerdy. His hands hold either side of the stethoscope hanging around his neck and he’s watching me closely. I wonder if Anna notices how handsome he is. He’s exactly her type—a decade older and brainy enough to have made it through medical school.

      “Better, I guess,” I say, my throat dry. I clear it a few times. “What happened?”

      “You just dropped!” Anna says, seeming quite frazzled. Her obvious panic adds volume to her words. “Like one second you were standing in front of me, and the next you were on the sidewalk.”

      “Sorry. I’m okay, I promise.” I hold the hand she puts on my shoulder, and watch her fiddle with the cell phone in her other hand. “You didn’t call anyone, did you?” She shakes her head, but she’s a terrible liar.

      “Anna?”

      “It went to voice mail. Twice.” I glare at her, hoping Gabe’s with a client and hasn’t picked up his voice mail yet. I don’t need anyone else looking at me the way Anna is at the moment. “Sorry, Teg, but you scared the crap out of me.”

      “Has this ever happened to you before?” The doctor asks. Now I see his name, embroidered over his scrub shirt pocket. Dr. Wallace.

      “No,” I say, shaking my head, which feels leaden. I’m glad I’m lying down. “But I haven’t been, um, sleeping well.” I swallow hard. In an instant everything lands back on me, like a boulder falling directly onto my chest. I try to breathe around the heaviness. “I was in a car accident a few months ago.”

      “Were you injured?”

      “Yes,” I say without elaboration. He waits, but I don’t add anything more.

      “It was quite serious,” Anna interjects. “She had to have surgery and was in the hospital for almost three weeks.”

      “What kind of surgery?” handsome Dr. Wallace asks, casually, like he’s asking how I take my coffee. He looks up from the chart and waits again for a response.

      It’s as if someone has sewn my lips together. I can’t get the words out.

      Anna looks at me, waiting, too, then at the doctor. “She, uh...” Anna glances my way again and I try to tell her it’s okay, she can tell him. The message must have come across despite my lack of voice, because she keeps going without taking her eyes off me. “She had a hysterectomy,” Anna says, adding more quietly, “and she was just over six months pregnant at the time.”

      Dr. Wallace stops writing and gives me the most excellent sympathetic look. One I’ve seen before. From my surgeon, who cut out my uterus right after the accident, along with any chance I had of becoming a mother.

      “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Dr. Wallace says, and I can tell he means it. His voice is smooth, confident, yet it carries an appropriate amount of compassion. They must practice that, doctors—how to convince a complete stranger you really care in one minute or less. “You mentioned you haven’t been sleeping. Any other changes to your health?”

      “She’s not been eating much, either,” Anna offers, before I can answer “No, nothing,” like I’d planned to.

      “Well, that could explain why you fainted,” he says. He licks his finger, which I find odd for an emergency room doctor to do, and flips over a page on the chart. I think about all the germs his hands must come in contact with during a single shift. I’d be wearing gloves, or carrying a bottle of hand sanitizer in my back pocket, but I guess he’s not all that concerned about getting sick. “Also, that patch on your upper arm? Nicotine patch?”

      I shake my head. “It’s an estrogen patch. They also removed my ovaries when I had the hysterectomy.” I say it as matter-of-factly as I can, but we all know what it means. I will never have a child. And every week, when I take off the old patch and put on a fresh one, the reminder of that makes me want to throw something, or punch someone, or collapse into a heap on my bathroom floor and never get up.

      The good doctor nods, and gives me another sympathetic smile. “I’m going to do a few more tests, just to be sure there isn’t something else going on, okay?”

      “Thank you,” Anna, my spokeswoman, says.

      “You bet...sorry, I missed your name. Miss?” he asks, his smile for Anna this time.

      “Anna,” she says, extending her hand. “Anna Cheng.”

      “Okay, so if everything checks out we’ll have you out of here soon. Sound good, Tegan?” I nod, and he pats my shoulder. “Just try and relax.”

      Three hours later Anna pushes me out of the hospital in a wheelchair—hospital policy, apparently—with a good handful of sleeping pills to get me through the next few nights until I can see my family doctor. A short cab ride later, I’m home and manage a pitiful thank-you when Anna strips me of my clothes and tucks me back into bed in new pajamas. The hollow welcomes me back like an old lover, and I settle in as Anna heads to the kitchen to make me soup and toast. A few minutes later I hear the front door open and close, and I brace myself for company, presuming Anna made that call after all.

      I roll over, settling deeper in the mattress, and feel the cool comfort of the pendant as the weight of my body presses it into my skin. For a moment, I indulge my grief-weary brain a reprieve and imagine what life would have looked like if the car had spun out thirty seconds later, after the row of steel lampposts.

       If only Gabe kept both his hands on the wheel.

       If only I stopped him from what he was doing under my skirt.

       If only the de-icing trucks had already been out.

      I close my eyes, only then remembering I left my hat and gloves at Starbucks.

      “Tegan.” Gabe’s voice startles me. Guess he got the voice mails.

      “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”

      He lies down beside me, barely disturbing the covers, but doesn’t touch me. He knows me so well.

      I keep my eyes tightly closed. “Let’s just say I may not be welcome back at the Starbucks at Michigan and Lake.”

      Gabe sighs. “But you’re okay. Right?”

      I nod against the pillow. His voice softens. “What happened?”

      “I

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